The Times Doesn’t Read Its Own Corrections, Makes the Same Mistake Again

Earlier this month, we noted an embarrassing correction in the New York Times:

A map on June 22 with the Mount Airy Journal article, about efforts in that North Carolina town to transform it into Mayberry, the fictional town created by Mount Airy’s native son, Andy Griffith, labeled incorrectly the state to the immediate west of Virginia. It is Kentucky, not West Virginia.

U.S. geography? Hey, that’s a tough subject, especially once you get west of the Hudson. This is the erroneous map that the Times published with its Mayberry article:

Red-faced editors replaced it with a corrected version:

But the paper’s reporters and editors failed, apparently, to absorb the lesson. And the old map evidently continued to float around the newsroom. So yesterday’s paper made the same correction for a second time:

A map with an article on Tuesday about the discovery of a 16th-century fort last month near Morganton, N.C., labeled incorrectly a state that borders Virginia to the west. It is Kentucky, not West Virginia.

To the extent that this suggests that the Times’s reporters and editors don’t read their own paper, I sympathize. I can’t stand to read it either. But they might try at least reading the corrections section, so they can avoid making the same mistakes over again.